Nineteen
by girl orpheus
Summary: Schuldich lives through nineteen. One shot.


**Notes: **Takes place sometime before the 1st season begins. Semi-cliché, but it's all right. shrugs Schuldich, Crawford and all associated persons and story lines sadly do not belong to me.

**Nineteen**  
By Lena Fryin

Crawford lets Schuldich get the living shit beaten out of him every once and a while.

Schuldich never resents him for it.

The blood crusted to the dip between his nostrils (left over from a prehistoric era when such an indentation was needed) more often than not deserves to be there, and that isn't self-loathing talking. The telepath quite likes himself, but that doesn't mean that he has never earned a broken nose or half a dozen bruises the color of a storm cloud. He earns such things not with actions but with words, with smart-ass, sardonic quips.

He will not punish his partner immediately. Rather, Crawford prefers to let nature take its course, to allow a mission go amiss. In other words, he lets Schuldich take his self-induced fall but After, Crawford would be there.

Usually, the precog is standing above him in these epilogues, colossal and beautiful like Michelangelo's magnificent boy-king David, countenance as affected by the sight of the broken and often bleeding Schuldich at his feet as an artic wasteland.

The Guilty One listens to his wet heart beat pounding against ribcage and charts to its irregular pulses humming through the concrete his body is splayed upon.

"Get up," Crawford says.

Incredibly, Schuldich never fails to.

This is the way it has been, will be, For and the Ever. It's habit anymore. Schuldich has made a tradition of pissing off the wrong people and mysteriously being able to survive the consequences.

His ability to do this probably stems from his unfortunate situation, one which calls for the tongue to be used as a weapon and not his fists in regards to anyone above him in station, for his fists do no more damage than a cloud shattered against the jagged surface of a mountain when it comes to the Elders.

Pissing off the wrong people is an art he has been practicing since he met Crawford, been perfecting since his hair was first dyed fire stone red and the world knew him only a Guilty shadow, a notorious figure illuminated by darkness who popped up in the newspapers from time to time, face blurred in rippling patterns of movement as though the camera man had snapped the photograph while he was immersed under water.

_"Look," Schuldich had said to Crawford, thrusting one finger at the black, screaming headline announcing that a pair of men had put an end to one Mr. John Reily, whose front teeth shattered when a bullet tore through them and buried itself in the back of his head. The murder made the front page and the telepath finds this deviously amusing. Bradley, on the other hand, knows there will be Hell to pay and more for their first exposure to the media._

_"We're like superheroes. People probably think we go to work in some fuckin' office building by day and go and blow the skulls off rich assholes by night. We do our jobs in spandex uniforms like the members of the damn Justice League." He grins, the smile unafraid in its youthful arrogance. Schuldich is nineteen, a golden age if ever there was on, and the world is more than his oyster. The world _belongs _to him, to his tarnished and infamous new name.  
_  
_"They're going to kill us for this," Crawford says, eyes flicking to Schuldich above the rims of his prim silver spectacles. The telepath lifts his diet soda--some brand name or another splashed with a what the can adamantly claims is a light, refreshing tint of lime that doesn't taste like anything more than a sour chemical composition--off the table, does not take a sip. He runs his thumb around its rim, the circular mouthpiece transforming the lazy beams of morning sunlight that hit it into drunken, looping spheres. A ring of nearly infinite light spins round the pupil of Crawford's left eye._

_"Then we'll kill them," says Schuldich, words reflecting the same adolescent overconfidence lining his thin lips. "Simple as that, Brad." The red head--for he was a red head then, not an albino whose pigment was drained by shock--raises the can and swings the last of it back with the same swift, swooping motion one usually associates with the downing of foul, potent alcohol. He wraps his fingers around the center of the can and applies a conservative amount of pressure to the tin container, which buckles inwards in response.  
_  
_Crawford returns to his newspaper, pages breezing past his efficient gunslinger's digits as he flips to the International Section of the Times. Schuldich never knows quite what the other man is looking for. Their names in print, the obituaries of enemies…or is he simply curious about the happenings of the society they both abandoned years ago? Surely he doesn't scour the newspapers for the few summaries of their exploits; if their _names _became public knowledge, they would know well before the masses that they had been exposed._

_"Very well," Crawford says to a sharp photograph of a politician forming the 'V for victory' signs with both hands. "We're leaving in seventeen minutes. If you're not ready by then, I'm leaving without you_."

_The Guilty One may toss aside insubordinate remarks with flippant ease, but in the end, he knows his place. He goes to pack. Oh, he'll get punished for a job well botched later, but 'later' is a long time from now. He could be dead before 'later'_ _rolls around._

He's nineteen--what the hell is the point of worrying?


End file.
